[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by EatingPie

Nailing Star Trek is somewhat deserved. On one hand, it takes place in space and utilizes space ships (science!).

Using science is not the same as being about science. Star Trek is nominally science fiction, yes, because of the "spaceships and ray guns" aspect, but it's far from hard SF. It's about a group of people who travel from place to place and have adventures; the science exists primarily to explain how they got there, or to set up the adventure du jour. You could replace them with a group on a naval ship visiting various islands and ports, or on horseback visiting various far-flung western towns, and the essential parts of the story would remain fundamentally the same. While the various series paid various levels of respect to science, it's still more along the lines of space opera.

On the other, they have an episode where young writer Jake Sisko " is told, "This isn't believable! You've never experienced this... write what you know"

And that is the stupidest thing ever told (and told, and told, and told) to aspiring writers. Joe Haldeman, coincidentally, had the best response to that piece of foolishness:

Bad books on writing and thoughtless English professors solemnly tell beginners to 'Write What You Know', which explains why so many mediocre novels are about English professors contemplating adultery.

As for the SF vs. Sci-Fi thing: "Sci-Fi" was another of Forrest Ackerman's endless neologisms, but in this case, one that was adopted by the mainstream as an insulting term for what they thought science fiction was: low-budget monster movies and "that Buck Rogers stuff". More recently, the existence of the TV channel has misled people, especially newer fans, into believing that it is a legitimate and accepted term. It isn't. It's an insult, and seeing people who are trying to be SF fans being tricked into using an insulting term for themselves, their literature, and their culture, is as upsetting to those who know the truth as it would be for members of any culture seeing their younger generation unknowingly calling themselves by a racial or ethnic epithet. There's a perfectly good abbreviation -- SF -- and no reason to do the equivalent of calling ourselves by the "n-word".

"Science fiction" versus "speculative fiction" isn't an argument, per se -- the former has decades of precedence -- but I have a certain leaning towards "speculative fiction" simply to help kill "sci-fi".

As for "SyFy" ... if they were in the habit of producing worthwhile SF, I might care. As far as I'm concerned, they can call themselves "This Network Intentionally Left Blank".